Ballet at the Royal Festival Hall

ummer has come to the Royal Festival Hall (if not
to the weather): the orchestras have moved out to the Promenade Concerts and the
touring companies have moved in. This week sees two programmes from the English National Ballet, yesterday evening being
the first.

Oddly enough I studied the
music used for the first ballet - Bach's Keyboard Concerto no. 1 in D minor -
for 'O' level music, fifty years ago (though I remember precious little of
whatever I learned about it then). Played here on a modern piano, of course,
rather than the harpsichord Bach would have expected, it's a lively and elegant
work whose rhythms and counterpoint lend themselves well to dance. The title, 'A
Million Kisses on My Skin', is pretty well meaningless: David Dawson's choreography combines classical
and more modern ballet movements as six women and three men dance in various
combinations on a plain white floor in a black surround, mostly backlit. The
ensembles are not danced in unison, rather with similar goups of movements of
one couple often following a bar or so behind another pair and then diverging -
sometimes reflecting the counterpoint but sometimes descending into a slight
muddle. It was danced with style and elegance, though occasionally I did feel
that the dancers were trying to inject an emotional resonance into what was
essentially abstract dance. The principals included Asta Bazeviciute, Laura
Bruña, Elena Glurdjidze and Fernando
Bufala.

The second item was the
premiere of a ballet by the company's Artistic Director, Wayne Eagling (I saw him as a Royal Ballet
principal many times in the 1970s). Titled 'Resolution' and set to Mahler's
sombre set of five short songs, the Ruckert Lieder, it was created for the
Duchenne charity dealing with the most severe form of Muscular Dystrophy. On a
bare stage lit with patterned overhead lighting couples dance quietly, the women
seeming vulnerable in the lifts. Sadness pervades the choreography as the
projected patterns change and mists form (though a loud hiss from the mist
generator did nothing for the amosphere - that needs seeing to). The final dance
is stark, the patterns gone, as two men assist a third who seems unable to move
on his own, holding him, moving his inert legs, and supporting him in lifts and
reaching out movements: at the end they withdraw, leaving him bowed and
despairing alone on the floor. Moving and compassionate without sentimentality,
it's a ballet which deserves to enter the repertoire. The dancers included
Bergoña Cao, Fernanda Oliveira, Mehdi Angot and Zhanat
Atymtayev.

Carl
Czerny (1791-1857) wrote a series of studies designed to make the
scales and arpeggios which are a necessary (but boring) part of a pianist's
training: in an orchestrated version some of these form the score for 'Etudes',
choreographed by Harold Lander in 1948, which begins with the
simple five foot positions which are lesson one (and which always gets a round
of applause) and introduces the various building blocks of classical
choreography - barre exercises, arabesques, lifts, spins, jumps
and leaps - first in simple form and gradually getting more and more
spectacular. It's always a popular show-off ballet, and the English National
Ballet have made it their own, dancing with a skill, precision and exuberance
which does it full justice. the principal dancers were Elena Glurdjidze (with a
stunning accelerating spin from gentle to alarmingly fast), César Morales,
and Zdenek Konvolina (replacing at very short notice Fernando Bufala who, it was
announced, had injured himself).

The
English National Ballet demonstrated in the whole evening that it's in the first
order of companies, despite the RFH's makeshift stage and the limitations of any
touring company: they have dates coming up in Oxford, Bristol, Southampton and
Manchester, and return to London at Christmas.